Venezuela

Venezuela is not—repeat, NOT—a major drug producing country. That is according to the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

It is not even a major transit country. That honour is reserved for Mexico and Central America which provide the major transport routes from production centres in Colombia, Bolivia and Peru.

Some cocaine is transited to the US through Venezuela but most of the drugs that passing through the South American country are bound for Europe, according to the DEA and UNDOC.

Then why, you may ask, has President Trump and his sidekick Pete Hegseth, blown up boats (allegedly carrying drugs)  coming mainly from Venezuela. So far 87 people have died in these legally suspect attacks. Why also, is a major US naval force led by the world’s largest aircraft carrier (the USS Gerald Ford) parked off the coast of Venezuela with the obvious intent of threatening regime change?

The answer is OIL.

Venezuela has the world’s largest proven oil reserves—330 billion barrels compared to 260 billion in Saudi Arabia, the world’s second largest.

But the oil is staying in the ground. It wasn’t always that way. In its production heyday, Venezuela was extracting 3.5 million barrels of oil a day. Current production is up significantly from a year ago but is still only 921,000 barrels a day.

This is because the state-owned oil company Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) is corrupt and inefficient. It has not maintained either the oil wells, the pipelines that carry the oil from the Orinoco Basin to coastal shipment centres or the storage depots or ships.

One of the reasons for the inefficiency is that roughly a quarter of Venezuela’s population has fled the oppressive regime of Nicolas Maduro. A large proportion of those refugees are the skilled workers needed to toil in the oil industry.

If Maduro is removed from power—as Donald Trump would dearly love to see—then the Opposition has said that it would privatise the Venezuelan oil industry and invite foreign companies to take over production. In fact, Opposition leader—and Nobel Peace Prize winner—Marina Corina Machado—met with oil companies last April to discuss how they could revive her country’s oil fortunes.

Most of those companies would be American and the exploitation of Venezuela’s heavy crude by American oil companies would be a good fit with Donald Trump’s foreign policy aims.

Honduras

Trump’s policies are nothing if not inconsistent. On the one hand he says he is at war with drug traffickers and his declaration of war justifies blowing up boats without legal due process.

On the other hand, he pardons the former President of Honduras—Juan Orlando Hernandez—who was sentenced to 45 years in prison for drug trafficking.

Hernandez served two terms as president from 2013 to 2021. While in office he was popular with both Barack Obama and Trump. Obama described him as one of “the excellent partners” on the migrant children crisis and Trump endorsed Hernandez when he ran for re-election in 2017.

Then some time in 2019 things started going badly for the Honduran president. It was revealed that he accepted a $1 million contribution to his re-election campaign from Mexican drug kingpin “El Chapo.” Shortly afterwards his brother Juan Antonio (“Tony”) Hernandez was sentenced to life imprisonment by a Miami judge for drug trafficking offenses.

Tony implicated his presidential brother and in 2022 Hernandez was arrested and extradited to the US shortly after leaving the presidential palace. His trial in 2024 took three weeks. His conviction was backed up by testimony from numerous witnesses, phone records and a “drugs ledger.” In his summing up the prosecutor said that Hernandez “paved a cocaine super highway to the US” along which moved 400 tons of illicit drugs.

Hernandez, however, did not give up. From his prison cell he wrote to President Trump claiming that his conviction was politically motivated and orchestrated by Joe Biden. This was all Trump needed. He pardoned Hernandez on the basis that his conviction was a “Biden Set-up.” On the same day he also re-pardoned the Thanksgiving turkeys which Biden had pardoned. Trump claimed that the turkey pardon was also illegal.

Macron and Putin

Two major diplomatic summits this week. Russian president Vladimir Putin went to India and French president Emmanuel Macron went to China.

Neither trip achieved very much.

Macron tried to persuade Xi Jinping to pressure Putin to reduce his Ukraine demands and to buy more EU goods. Xi refused Macron on both counts. Xi pressured Macron to persuade the Japanese prime minister to be less bellicose over Taiwan. The French president refused.

Putin’s visit to India was big on pomp and ceremony but light on substance as Modi tried balance a growing relatively new relationship with the US with the older relationship with Russia.

Oil was a big topic. India’s purchase of discounted Russian oil has been helping to finance Russia’s Ukraine war. The US has threatened increased tariffs on India unless Modi stops buying Russian oil. Putin used the visit to promise India “uninterrupted flows of Russian oil.”  But Modi refused to say he would take advantage of the pledge.

Russia has also been a traditional source of weaponry for India. Before Putin’s visit there was much talk of Indian purchases of state-of-the-art Russian fighter jets and air defense systems. But no deal was signed.

Both Putin and Macron could have stayed home.

* Tom Arms is foreign editor of Liberal Democrat Voice. He also contributes to “The New World” magazine and lectures on world affairs. He is the author of “America Made in Britain,” two editions of “The Encyclopaedia of the Cold War” and “The Falklands Crisis.”